Legal Innovation Briefing - July Edition

Contacts

Welcome to this month’s Legal Innovation Briefing, a monthly selection of insights and updates curated for in-house legal teams.

Some of the legal sector’s best innovation is coming out of the Law Without Walls (LWOW) programme.

LWOW is a global initiative designed to help change the mindsets, skillsets and behaviours of practicing and aspiring lawyers.

One of this year’s winning solutions was a bot that optimises in-house knowledge management by automatically identifying, tagging and uploading external legal advice - something that will spark the interest of many! We will share a video and presentation with more detail on the bot in next month’s briefing.

The big idea: collaboration and diversity drives innovation

Research shows that teams with a broader range and diversity of members solve problems more effectively, come up with more blue-sky solutions, and better understand potential users of products.

LWOW is an example of diversity and collaboration at its best. Each year, 100 students from more than 30 law and business schools are teamed up with business, academic, entrepreneur, and legal mentors.

Over 16 weeks, teams create a business case and practical solution to a real problem assigned and sponsored by a corporate legal department, law company or law firm.

This year the sponsors came from a variety of industries and included Spotify, HSBC and Microsoft. The solutions developed also varied widely and ranged from a GDPR compliance tool for Fintech start-ups, to an app which matches victims of natural disasters to building contractors.

We look forward to seeing what excellent legal innovations are developed in next year’s LWOW competition.

What we are up to: Legal Innovation workshop series

After three fully subscribed sessions in Auckland and Wellington, we will be running our legal process improvement workshop in Christchurch on Thursday 9 August.

Led by Caroline Ferguson and Alexander Ivanov from our Business Transformation team, the workshop looks at:

how to best adapt process improvement methodologies to legal processes

how to get started, and the five key steps to follow for sustainable process improvements

how other in-house legal teams have improved the accuracy, speed and quality of their processes.

Other upcoming topics in the Legal Innovation series include:

12 July (Auckland) and 25 July (Wellington) - how legal teams can effectively engage with agile processes (limited places available); and

9 August (Auckland) - knowledge sharing and information within and across departments (four places available).

Digest: legal podcasts to check out

Whether you are cooking dinner, driving or out for a walk, podcasts can be a great way to efficiently use your time and learn something new. Here are a couple of our favourite recent legal podcasts to check out:

London calling - legal tech startups: interview with Nick West, Chief Technology Officer at Mischcon de Reya and Director of MDR Lab, a legal tech incubator based at Mishcon’s London office